Dammit!

I knew at the time that it would come to this. All right—I couldn’t imagine quite how bad the “this” was going to be, but I knew it would be bad.

In 1989, the Supreme Court was asked to decide whether the railroads had the right to ask their workers to go into a room and piss in a cup. There had been accidents before, drugs were found to be the culprit, and so the railroads decided to check for drugs via urine testing.

Did it ever make sense?

Of course not. If you smoked a joint on Saturday night, you were spilling metabolites in your urine on Monday—but you weren’t under the effects of the drug. Conversely, if you snorted cocaine on the way to work, you were soaring like a kite, but not spilling metabolites.

Then there was the problem of all the over the counter drugs like Sudafed which gave false positives—sure, more sophisticated tests were available, but unsurprisingly, they were also more expensive.

It was a period of drug hysteria—remember dear Nancy Reagan peering out of the darkness that was presumably drug addiction and whispering hamishly (in the manner of a ham, computer—lump it!), “just say no!?” Remember Bill, who smoked but didn’t inhale?

Of all people, Antonin Scalia got it. Here’s what he said:

The impairment of individual liberties cannot be the means of making a point…symbolism, even symbolism for so worthy a cause as the abolition of unlawful drugs, cannot validate an otherwise unreasonable search.

Right—knew we had to agree on something….

So I was prepared, when Wal-Mart wanted me to come work as an English teacher, for the ordeal of taking the bus out to a clinic, pissing in the bottle with the bathroom door six inches ajar, not washing my hands until after I had given the bottle to the apologetic technician. She took it, stuck a thermometer in it, and then let me use the sink.

Full disclosure: I last used marijuana in—was it the eighties? Nineties? You get the point….

So I knew about that. What didn’t I know?

47% of employers routinely do a credit check on job applicants.

Well, you can imagine the snort I made—even Franny, my beloved mother resting quietly in the afterlife, couldn’t have done better.

Consider the case of Alfred J. Carpenter, a shoe salesman in New York City who got laid off. Not a problem, he thought—his resume was good, he had worked for some high-end names like Ferragamo and J. M. Weston. And since he was healthy, he didn’t need to get health insurance, he reasoned.

Wrong—he tore two ligaments in his knee playing roller hockey. And so the bills piled up, and he was struggling to pay them. A friend thought he could work at Bergdorf Goodman; he applied and all was well. But then that went sour, too; soon he was in bankruptcy. But he kept applying for positions, and even took to disclosing his poor credit with prospective employers. No luck, and no dice. Down to his last 200 dollars, he’s now on welfare and food stamps.

The irony of it is that the company has to ask your permission to check your credit. But if you say no? Is there anyone out there who seriously thinks that if you way no, that won’t be held against you? If so, please contact me at once, since I have several really nice pieces of real estate—including bridges—to sell at the moment.

I can hear you—what possible reason would an employer have to check your credit? Well, The New York Times says this:

“Employers are looking for a sense of responsibility,” said Richard Mellor, a vice president at the National Retail Federation. “They want to see that an individual pays their bills on time and takes responsibility for what they buy.”

There are several problems. First is the obvious one—anyone in this economy looking for a job is probably not going to have the best credit. Here’s The New York Times again:

“Someone loses their job,” Ms. Wu said, “so they can’t pay their bills — and now they can’t get a job because they couldn’t pay their bills because they lost a job? It’s this Catch-22 that makes no sense.” It can also be a kind of backdoor job discrimination, Ms. Wu contends, given the numerous studies that demonstrate that those black, Latino or simply poor are more likely to have lower credit scores than those who are white and have means.

Obviously, Ms. Wu gets it. And she goes on to say:

To Ms. Wu and others, a credit report says more about a person’s economic circumstances than his or her moral character. “Some people can go to daddy and say, ‘I can’t pay my bills, will you bail me out?’ ” Ms. Wu said. “And others can’t.”

The other problem? Often, the credit agencies’ reports are incorrect, and everybody who has ever had to deal with these agencies knows—it’s a nightmare. Somehow, the mistake that you corrected in January appears regularly in February.

The solution? Well, nine states have laws regulating or prohibiting the use of credit checks by employers recruiting personnel. But it should be at the federal level—not the state level.

So it was the snowball effect, just as Scalia—probably—feared. First it was just pissing into a cup, then it was giving up your credit privacy, and now? It’s having the government get your telephone / Internet history, if not listening in on your calls or reading your email.

It was Vonnegut, I think, who observed that the Star Spangled Banner is the only national anthem that ends with a question. Remember? We sing it at every baseball game….

And does that flag still wave, over the free and the brave?